In current business practice, there is a need for data transfer between companies, whether the data transfer is for a sale, an exchange, or any of the other various types of data transfers related to business transactions. The inventors of the present invention have determined that there is a need for a product or method that will allow an efficient transform of messages or documents between one company's internal system format to a common format, and then from the common format to another company's internal system format. That way, documents and messages can be readily transferred between companies.
EDI was developed to support business-to-business internal communication, and it has been around for approximately the last twentyfive years. However, EDI is also relevant for all company-to-supplier retailer relationships, where the company can be an end-user, a manufacturer, a service organization such as a hospital or a hotel, a governmental organization or a virtual organization.
EDI can be viewed as a set of messages developed for business-to-business communication of electronic data. It works by providing a collection of standard message formats and element dictionaries for businesses to exchange data via any electronic messaging service, and is characterized by standardized electronic formats for exchanging business data. Thus, EDI is conveniently used in electronic commerce for the exchange of documents between trading partners in a transaction.
Companies sending and/or receiving EDI data are required to ensure that they have tailored software programs that map between the two types of data, one being EDI data and the other being data in the company's internal system formats. Such mapping is a complex process that requires extensive resources and is time consuming. Also, changes in one document result in extensive changes to be made to other documents that utilize the document. Therefore, there is a need for more efficient tools to facilitate the mapping process, and to convert documents in one EDI format to documents in one or more other EDI formats.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional document management arrangement, in which a single application is linked to many documents or messages. Each document typically represents a type of transaction, such as an invoice or a purchase order or an advance shipping notice (ASN), and the application creates and/or modifies the documents or messages.
A single application, represented by box 110 in FIG. 1, is represented at run-time by an application message. In the example shown in FIG. 1, there are three different application messages that can be generated from the application 110, one being a Purchase Order (PO) application message 120, another being an Invoice application message 130, and yet another being an ASN application message 140. These are all application messages created from the same application, but they are different because the message or document to be created from the same application 110 is different. The result is a complex mapping of different application messages to documents or messages in a conventional EDI system. For example, three separate mappings are shown in FIG. 1, one for each application message of the single application 110.
There is also a problem with conventional EDI systems in that a change in the format of one document may result in changes to the formats of several other documents. This is because the EDI system represents documents in a manner associated with the EDI system, and a change in format of one document may be propagated across other documents via document representation mechanisms. Another situation in which this occurs is that of changing an application in a manner which causes document formats to be changed.